A London startup says it will create driverless cars by 2019, beating Ford and BMW by two years

A London startup says it will create driverless cars by 2019, beating Ford and BMW by two years

The future can’t come quickly enough for London autonomous driving startup Five.ai. The company, which raised $2.7 million in July, promises to deliver fully autonomous vehicles to the market by 2019. That’s two years ahead of similar projects announced by Ford and BMW. Five.ai thinks it will beat the incumbents by using more sophisticated machine-learning that will help a vehicle understand its surroundings without the need to constantly compare its data against ultra-precise, three-dimensional maps created by radar systems, an approach being tested by Ford and Google. A vehicle running Five.ai’s software, and rigged with the requisite cameras and sensors, would use a convolutional neural network to perceive an object’s depth instead of relying on data from high-resolution 3D maps. This gives the vehicle greater autonomy, the startup says. “They…